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Was it worth paying this much to repair a lens
when I already had another Nikon lens that was in some respects even
better? Yes. Absolutely, because there really is a
difference and when you want to do your best---you damn well better be
willing to pay for it. So why am I telling all of you this, when
I'm getting away from my story about S.P.E.W.? I just want
you to imagine how good the original pictures look because these are
compressed and downsized.
These are some of the thousands of pictures I took so if anyone
tells you their pictures were of S.P.E.W., they had to be shooting next to me in
Missouri or Iowa or what they are passing off to you is counterfeit.
I don't think there will ever again be anything quite
like S.P.E.W. It was the brainchild of Big Daddy, now club owner of
Teaser's Hard Rock Cabaret in Alabama. While he was in college, Big Daddy
worked for topless clubs as a D.J. He also had a stint at
professional wrestling, performing with a partner on television as the Assassins until knee
injuries forced an early retirement on him.
S.P.E.W. started the weekend Dirty Heather came down from
Iowa to take on Killer Kloey, who was then the star female wrestler at Big
Daddy's Cabaret in Dixon, Missouri. One thing led to another. I had
done professional photography for Big Daddy and I had gotten Heather in Xtreme Magazine as "Dirty Heather" modeling with a .357 magnum Python and as
"Machine Gun Heather" where she posed with a M1919 30 caliber Browning Machine
Gun.
S.P.E.W. started as a convergence of so many things
coming together at the same time. Most of the clientele at Big Daddy's
Cabaret were U.S. servicemen based at Fort Leonard Wood three miles from the
club. So, it was a gung-ho kind of crowd of young guys many of them about
to ship out to Iraq. But Big Daddy had missed his calling having to settle
for being just the club owner when his greatest talent was behind the microphone
as a night club D.J. And being the showman he is, he could have really
caught on as a television wrestler if it had not been for the injuries. So
he brought on the U.S. Marines and the U.S. Army infantrymen and had them
wrestle his strippers. They did it every Saturday night. It was
usually two girls against just one of American's finest fighting men but the
stuff they wrestled in could be anything from hot oil to hot biscuits and gravy.
Meanwhile the hottest club in the Midwest had become the
Lumberyard in Des Moines, Iowa. They had a young, aggressive general
manager there, Big Mike, a big guy who actually made Big Daddy look small.
Pure Talent Agency had a couple of feature showcases at the Lumberyard, and I
did the photography. Then Miss Nude World was held at the Lumberyard, Big
Mike started bringing busloads of his dancers to
Nudes-A-Poppin. The club
spent A LOT OF MONEY, but a lot of money put the Lumberyard on the Map in a huge
way. Big Mike and Big Daddy met at Exotic Dancer's Expo in Las Vegas, an
adult convention attended by strip club owners, managers, porn stars, feature
entertainers, photographers and writers such as myself. Once Big Mike and
Big Daddy got together the heads started to churn.
"We would have the championship stripper wrestling match
in the world" pitting Big Daddy's top wrestler, Killer Kloey against Iowa's most
destructive female, the incomparable Dirty Heather," we all decided. A few
weeks later, Big Mike and the head of his club security came down from Iowa to
witness the event. Dirty Heather brought an attractive girlfriend with her and Krazy Ted, an Iowa strip club D.J. friend of hers. Big Daddy hired Leah
Layne to be his club's feature entertainer for the weekend, and I was able to
convince Pain and Pleasure, a mother-daughter strip club duo from Columbus,
Ohio, to join all of us for the big event.
Leah Layne got a nice suite in Rolla, Missouri and
invited the gang down so
Pleasure and Pain, Krazy Ted, Dirty Heather, and Megan
all having rooms in the same hotel wound up taking turns in Leah's hot tub.
Nearly all of us landed parts in Big Daddy's drama that was about to unfold.
The match started with Killer Kloey and Dirty Heather
badmouthing each other, and when Big Daddy told Heather, "In other words Kloey
says you are not worth a fuck," Dirty Heather went after Big Daddy with a heavy
championship wrestling belt. At the critical moment Big Daddy slipped and
fell down and Krazy Ted got clobbered with the heavy belt in the face. He
went down, and when he came up his face was pouring blood.
Now I can't say for sure, but I heard a rumor that Big
Daddy had a razor blade taped to his fingers so when he went down and Krazy Ted
fell on top of him, BD cut Krazy Ted right across the face. Considering
that Big Daddy and I have become great friends and it was Big Daddy who led all
of his to Thailand on our first trip, and we've been through a lot together, I'd
have to say, "Yes. Big Daddy will do anything to put on a great show.
That's what makes him so special and that's why there will never be another
S.P.E.W. There's hardly a man alive who can top Big Daddy on the
microphone, and it's really hard to find anyone with BD's incredible
imagination.
Then there's the fight that breaks out when Paine goes
out from the crowd into the ring to fight Leah Layne who's refereeing the match.
Paine gets carried off into the crowd kicking and screaming.
You will just have to watch the video of the first
S.P.E.W. match to see just how outrageous the event turned out. But that was
just the start. Big Daddy and Big Mike teamed up to form S.P.E.W.--Sexy
Professional Wrestling. We'd have five strippers drive nearly 400 miles
from Iowa to come down to Missouri to take on five of Big Daddy's wrestlers, and
then four weeks later I'd wind up travelling with Big Daddy and five of his
dancers to take on five of Big Mike's girls at the Lumberyard. Eventually Big
Mike and Big Daddy would charge other topless clubs and the entire S.P.E.W. cast
would be transported to the strip club footing the bill. Big Daddy wound
up becoming the general manager at the Iowa Playhouse Strip Club in Council
Bluffs and then we'd have the S.P.E.W. wrestling matches there and at the Lumber
Yard.
Big Daddy and Big Mike would come up with some great
scenes. We'd even have rehearsals the afternoon before the matches.
One of the plots involved two sisters. One of the girls had a boyfriend
and the other sister made love to the boyfriend, and of course the first sister
found out and challenged the philandering sister to a wrestling match to the
death. I still remember how Big Daddy announced the grudge match to the
crowd over the microphone, and the guys in the crowd actually believed the two
strippers had been sisters. There would be fights involving over a half a
dozen strippers in the middle of the ring and security would be called in to
break them up.
Big Daddy and Big Mike even made a DVD which we sold on the internet
of S.P.E.W. However, the actual production was done by a rock and roll
band. In my opinion there was hardly any attention made to the people who
really made S.P.E.W. what it was. Big Daddy, one of the finest DJ's I've
ever seen was overshadowed by the band's music. I don't think Big Mike was
ever seen in the Video. All the warped plots hatched out of Big Daddy's creative
mind never made it into the video and the girls who had spent all those hours on
the road, in hotels away from home, and performing in clubs hundreds of miles
from their home turf never got the recognition they deserved. The DVD
never enjoyed the sales it could have gotten. All the glory went to the
rock and roll band as far as I was concerned with S.P.E.W. being put in the back
seat. In my opinion Big Daddy, Big
Mike, and I should have produced our own video and left all the so called
professionals out in the Parking lot playing for marbles.
S.P.E.W. had a great run. Customers would come to
the clubs in droves to watch the whacky, zany theater Big Daddy, Big Mike and
their accomplices put on. I don't think any club has ever put anything on
like it for its customers--EVER, let alone several clubs working together.
Big Daddy and Big Mike were just so talented and so daring. And think of
it, both men were able to inspire enough of their dancers to go out on the road
to make far less money than they could have had they stayed home and made their
tips on their tried and tested customers. Those girls were terrific.
I know because I traveled with them. Finally, S.P.E.W. became
unsustainable when Big Daddy finally quit his job as general manager at the Iowa
Playhouse and bought a club in Alabama. After that there was just too much
distance between the Lumberyard in Des Moines, Iowa and Teaser's in Alabama.
Big Daddy lost his Missouri girls. He would have had to start with an entirely new group of girls. There was
no military base near Teaser's so Big Daddy didn't have the same crowd he once
had with young gung ho U.S. Marines being some of his staunchest customers.
You just had to have
been there. All those young Marines in the club cheering their
comrade on as he tried to prevail in the hot oil against two naked
strippers--or cheering their favorite Missouri strippers on as they
tried to outdo the Iowa girls. Or the whole club filling up in
Iowa, with customers, in both the Lumberyard and Iowa Playhouse.
Women who were not strippers even came to watch the wrestling or to display their naked
breasts when Big Daddy would call them onto the stage. Those were great
times back then, and I was privileged to be the man behind the camera.
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